Many types of computing, communication, and routing functions are provided using a blade enclosure filled with blades. The blades may provide switching, routing, storage, storage array network access and computing functions. A computing blade includes a processor, non-volatile program storage, data interfaces and some amount of local memory for software or for data storage. A storage blade will likely include the same components but optimized to maximize the storage capacity and speed of access. Other types of blades are optimized in other ways. For computing and many of the other blade types, most of the computer including its operating system and applications are on the blade while the enclosure provides power, cooling, management, and networking. The enclosure houses multiple blades so that the enclosure provides a common infrastructure to support the entire chassis, rather than providing each of these on a per server box basis. When the blades are individually hot-swappable, the blade enclosure may provide more reliable service than high power individual servers.
Blade servers are employed for many tasks that are not best served by a single autonomous computer, such as web hosting, virtualization, and cluster computing. The blade structure may also be easy to upgrade in speed, computing power, and storage space by adding more blades or swapping in more powerful blades.
A new family of blade server systems is referred to as microservers. Microservers are designed to provide the types of services enjoyed by big data at a much lower cost for small to mid-size businesses. Microserver blades consisting of one or more CPUs, a memory, and an Ethernet data communications interface are mounted side-by-side in a single chassis. Backup and redundancy functions can be built in so that the failure of one blade does not affect the other and the failed blade can easily be swapped out.
The blades communicate with each other and any outside connection through a backplane in the blade enclosure. The blade enclosure also provides power, management and other functions. All of the blades are connected together through the backplane. This single connection is much simpler for maintenance and repair than direct communication between the individual units. A similar architecture is used for some communication switching systems, for network storage arrays, and for some medium scale server rack systems. For other systems, while each computer module is on a rack beside or near other computer modules, all communications between the modules are through a network switch. System management is also through the same network switch but requires a separate terminal.